Fight for recognition

Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny’s latest album, DeBi TiRAR Mas FOTOS (Spanish for “I should have taken more photos”), has taken the charts by storm. Raw, emotional, and unapologetic, the album is a love letter to the pro-independence movement of Puerto Rico, capturing the heartbreak of a people seeing their land slipping away.

- Rithwik Sundar

The album lays bare the reality of gentrification choking the island's culture and identity, while calling out the tide of uninformed mass tourism that’s contributing to the erasure of Puerto Rico's native people and natural heritage. In a similar vein, communities across the world are confronting the same forces of displacement and exploitation. And here in India, another spirited group of people — Goans from the villages of Loliem and the neigh-bouring Poingunin — who hold their culture and roots dear, are pushing back on large-scale infrastructure projects invading their natural resources and land.

Since 2011, starting with the Gadgil Report, also known as the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) report, the demarcation of Eco Sensitive Areas (ESAs) in the Western Ghats has been at the centre of environmental and political debates involving the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu. The ESA notification, which has been contested by